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Mon-Fri 8am-6.30pm, Sat 9am-6pm & Sun 9am-7.30pm; free. Metro: Bourse . Walking northwest out of the Grand-Place along rue au Beurre, you come across the pint-sized church of St Nicholas on the right-hand side. It dates from the twelfth century, but has been heavily restored on several occasions, most recently in the 1950s, when parts of the outer shell were reconstructed in a plain Gothic style. The church is dedicated to St Nicholas of Bari, the patron saint of sailors, or, as he's better known, Santa Claus. The church is unusual in so far as the three aisles of the nave were built at an angle to the chancel, in order to avoid a stream. It also carries a memento of the French bombardment of 1695 in the cannon ball embedded high up in the third pillar on the left of the nave. Otherwise, the gloomy church hardly sets the pulse racing, although - among a scattering of objets d'art - there's a handsome, gilded copper reliquary shrine near the entrance. The shrine was made in Germany in the nineteenth century to honour a group of Catholics martyred by Protestants in Gorinchem in the Netherlands in 1572.
Maison Dandoy, at rue au Beurre 31, is something of a city institution, a long-established confectioner's whose tasty specialties are macaroons and "spekuloos", a sugary brown, cinnamon-flavoured biscuit that's prepared in a variety of traditional and intricate moulds.
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